provided you leave the city and never see my daughter again.”
Luke drew a quick breath of air but tried not to get his hopes up. It was probably just a cruel taunt, like a cat playing with a mouse.
“I don’t believe it,” he finally managed to say. “Why would you open the prison door when you’ve got the opportunity to twist the knife even deeper?”
Clyde’s eyes narrowed. “As much as I would love to twist that knife, it would cost too much. My objective is to expunge you from my daughter’s life. I can’t do that if she harbors misplaced guilt over you.”
Luke wouldn’t trust Clyde to make him a ham sandwich. “You don’t have the power to drop the charges. The complaint against me was filed by the chairman of the Committee on Manufactures. That’s Roland Dern. Get him in here to make the promise, and I’ll consider it.”
“Absolutely not,” Clyde said. “You have already endangered my daughter’s reputation by involving her in this scandal.”
Luke leaned back in his chair. “Did I? Or am I languishing in jail because I’m protecting her? I will never do anything to hurt Marianne, and that should say something about my regard for her.”
“Take your regard and get out of town with it. My daughter is on the verge of becoming engaged to Colonel Henry Phelps, a man of valor whose good name will honor and protect her.”
It was a slap in the face, but Luke tried not to show how badly this hurt. The worst thing was that it was true. Colonel Phelps did have a sterling reputation. He was a decent, battle-tested man with no demons inside. Marianne probably would be better off with Colonel Phelps, and it sickened him.
But he would never take a payoff to turn his back on her. Marianne was the one pure thing in his life. She made him want to be a better man. She inspired him to reach higher, try harder, and seek out the better angels of his nature. He would protect Marianne, no matter what the cost to himself.
He stood, the leg-irons making a loud clank in the barren room. “No deal.”
The guard led him back to the laundry, where the heat and confinement threatened to suffocate him.
Marianne didn’t have much experience with boredom, and the hours stretched painfully in her bedroom prison. It had been two days, and Clyde made good on his threat to send all her meals upstairs and had forbidden her from mingling with the rest of the family.
Her bedroom door had no lock, but the force of Clyde’s anger was more effective than any dead bolt. She stayed in her room, but the isolation terrified her. Some people might be able to be alone, but she wasn’t one of them. She already knew what Andrew and Delia thought of her, but what did Vera think? Surely her mother had been told, but Vera made no attempt to see her, and that snub spoke with the power of a trumpet blast.
It had been two days. It was hard to guess how long Clyde intended to enforce this banishment, because she’d never seen him this angry before. She sat on her bed and stared at the four walls, counting the ways she could have lived the past six months differently. She could have been more honest with her parents about Luke or been more forthcoming about negotiating a truce with the Delacroixs. It probably wouldn’t have worked, but she owed her parents more than she’d given them.
But was it all her fault? If she could design a perfect family, no one would ever fear being kicked out or shunned. Over the last few months she’d learned terrible things about her family, but none of it could stop her from loving them. She had been planted in this family, put down her roots with them, and clung to them as naturally as a vine clung to a trellis. She didn’t want to be ripped out and torn away. No matter how badly they treated her, she still wanted to belong.
A gentle tapping on her bedroom door made her sit bolt upright. It wasn’t time for dinner yet, so perhaps Vera was coming to see her at last.
“Yes?” she asked, racing to the door and tugging it open, but it was only Bridget, the downstairs maid. Marianne tried not to let her disappointment show.
“This came for you in the mail today,” Bridget said, holding a package. It had been opened because